Misc.

At the grocery store one evening a young man was playing the public piano; it was one of Chopin's etudes. You know the one: the rolling, windy, rollicking, unhinged, mad one. He was getting ahead of himself a bit, stumbling and jumbling the keys; he clearly had just learned the piece, but that was irrelevant. It was a Chopin etude being played in a grocery store. To hell with the simpering emotional cliches on the speakers. It was great to be checking out items while listening to his playing...until I turned and saw the woman beside me with her mobile device out recording it. That turned me off. The thought that she was doing it for material to post on her facebook or on whatever was one thing, but the overestimation she was giving to the incident - a piano beginner sort of stumbling on a piece that's not particularly complicated in comparison to the composer's other works - had the paradoxical effect of cheapening it. The charm, the ordinary human charm, was blasted in an instant like it was more than her right to suck all the good vibes out of this natural occurrence of blooming human culture. Good grief, like I said, it pissed me off.

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I had atemoya fruit the other day for the first time. I know it's not the finest regarded of the moyas, but is still considered top notch. I let them ripen properly like avocados, and I know I didn't have the ultimate tree-ripened specimens, still, all that considered...I could easily go without. The full on sweetness, sure, it was nice, and the texture too, great. Except it was also kind of horrible. So smooth, the way the fruit flaked apart in nice creamy but firm sections, the mouth feel: what in all other circumstances should have been sublime had the opposite effect of reminding me very distinctly of fully cooked, mild, white fish meat falling off the bone, like tilapia. Indeed, I started thinking of tilapia while eating the atemoya, and I began to gag and would nearly have thrown up if I didn't keep it in check with a will of iron.

So for those of you who will eat atemoya in the near future: remember, whatever you do, do not, I repeat, DO NOT THINK OF TILAPIA!

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The neo-formalist school of poetry is basically a load of humbug. I say that entirely from the perspective of poetry reader. I haven't written a poem in my life - or at least that's the way I feel about what I have written. But the New Formalist cult has all the weary preening bullshitting of the thoroughly auspicious appropriators; poets who cling with too much attachment and with too much science to the effects they have felt from poetry, and fall into the trap of reproducing it - and that is precisely the failure - by execution, by imitation.

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I came across a news article saying that the 90's show Mad About You is going to get rebooted, and I was quite delighted - even more delighted to hear that Paul Reiser and Helen Hunt regularly get together about every month for lunch because they care about each other a lot. That was very sweet, to know they weren't just actors doing their thing and that the sense I had from the show was that there was something real being produced between them. Yes, I would watch the show when I was in high school. It just had a good feeling about it. That, and I had a crush on Helen Hunt.

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Listening to anti-Francis Trads more and more is like listening to someone making sounds inside an aquarium inside an echo chamber inside a lead-coated underground bunker. Completely obsessed with symbols, they reduce and dehumanize and are quite superstitious. Good luck with that!